Down’s Syndrome
Article
Down’s Syndrome is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 03, 2021 and January 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “claiming that Down’s Syndrome (sometimes called mongolism”; “talk to a person with Down’s Syndrome”; “often Down’s Syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome, or severe autism”. It most often appears alongside 9-11, Aporia, Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed?.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: March 03, 2021
- Last seen: January 15, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 9-11 (1 shared issues)
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- Aporia (1 shared issues)
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- Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? (1 shared issues)
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- Argentina (1 shared issues)
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- Austin Allred (1 shared issues)
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- Ayn Rand Institute (1 shared issues)
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- Big Mac (1 shared issues)
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- Big Mac Index (1 shared issues)
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- black Americans (1 shared issues)
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- Blackrock (1 shared issues)
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- Bloomberg (1 shared issues)
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- Brendan Nyhan (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
26: The Mongol In Our Midst was a 1920s pseudoscience book claiming that Down’s Syndrome (sometimes called mongolism because affected babies look kind of Asian if you’re racist and have a vivid imagination) was literally caused by relic Asian genes that Europeans got from Mongol hordes raping their ancestors. Seems to have been taken somewhat seriously at the time and was reviewed in JAMA and Nature, though I can’t access the reviews to see how critical they were.
Inline links: The Mongol In Our Midst
Second, isn’t it preposterous and against common sense to compare sub-Saharan Africans to the intellectually disabled? You can talk to a Malawian person, and talk to a person with Down’s Syndrome, and the former is obviously much brighter and more functional than the latter. Doesn’t that mean that the estimates have to be wrong?
Kirkegaard explains that when we think of intellectually disabled people we’ve met, we’re usually thinking of people with some specific syndrome - often Down’s Syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome, or severe autism. These people have abnormally low IQ. But their syndromes also cause motor deficits, executive function deficits, emotional processing deficits, and many other forms of deficit.
For example, people with Down’s Syndrome may have trouble speaking, or speak abnormally. But this is primarily because Down Syndrome affects hearing (through ear structure abnormalities) and speech production (through tongue/mouth/chest abnormalities). The cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the deficit.